摘要：Creating visually pleasing graphs in data visualization programs such as Matlab is surprisingly challenging. One common problem is that the positions and sizes of non-data elements such as textual annotations must typically be specified in either data coordinates or in absolute paper coordinates, whereas it would be more natural to specify them using a combination of these coordinate systems. I propose a framework in which it is easy to express, e.g., “this label should appear 2 mm to the right of the data point at (3, 2)” or “this arrow should point to the datum at (2, 1) and be 5 mm long.” I describe an algorithm for the correct layout of graphs of arbitrary complexity with automatic axis scaling within this framework. An implementation is provided in the form of a complete 2D plotting package that can be used to produce publication-quality graphs from within Matlab or Octave.
